Many people know Madam Walker as ‘the hair lady.' I like to look at her as a woman who is one of the great American rags-to-riches stories. She transformed herself from an illiterate washerwoman into one of the wealthiest businesswomen in the world.
A'Lelia Bundles is president of the Madam Walker/A'Lelia Walker Family Archives and author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, the first comprehensive biography of her great-great-grandmother.
Following a three-decade career as an executive and Emmy award-winning producer for NBC News and ABC News, Bundles is now president of the Foundation for the National Archives, and is writing a biography of her great-grandmother, A'Lelia Walker, whose parties helped define the Harlem Renaissance.